I am a developer, who knows close to nothing about design, so please bear with me. As I read books about design, I keep getting stuck at the idea of a grid system such as 960gs. I completely understand designing within a width of 960px, but I don't understand what the red columns are for, or how this helps with the layout of a site. As a side note, I don't really see the benefit of the class library, as it just seems to increase load time for basic styles.

A skeleton or framework basicaly just sets the max width of a page and inserts collumns in that width.

For example you can have four collumns each 240px wide ( 4 x 240 = 960). This means that you can have one, two, three, four ( and possibly more) collumns which makes it super easy to customize a page with simple html coding with some css backbone.

i'm sorry, i still don't follow. what exactly are the columns for? what exactly is a column in regard to layout? again, i nearly have any knowledge of design. and how do you design/layout a page according to a grid system framework?

You can see the slider and below are three "services" blocks! Those three blocks are collumns (might wanna take a look at the source code of that page and you'll see it in div's ) Aswell as the text below them.

You can search "skeleton HTML framework". You'll find HTmL and CSS "boilerplates". This means that you can just download those files and use them directly in your design! Basically it's a CSS file with predefined collumn widths made into classes and you can use those classes in your HTML file ( div class= ).

It's hard for me to explain why this is so usefull, but if you spend a little time using it you'll just notice that such a boilerplate makes it so much easier to customize a templates look and feel witouth to much hassle! ^_^

hope i've helped and if you have any qestions do not hesitate to contact me!

This might help you!! When you get to the web site under the first column to your left which is about articles click on the first following article "The 960 Grid System Made Easy" or, you can get there quicker by clicking on the website link I have provided below: